


Five Times Andrew Garner Fell In Love With Melinda May's Smile (And One Time She Fell In Love With His)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Backstory, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Happy Ending, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6259702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always loves to make her smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Andrew Garner Fell In Love With Melinda May's Smile (And One Time She Fell In Love With His)

**one**

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love.

It’s sort of but not exactly against the rules.

He wasn’t even supposed to ever meet her - if it wasn’t for the fact that her best friend was one of the agents Andrew’s supervisor had him treating. Andrew was too young and too ambitious and it wasn’t just that SHIELD had promised to pay for his master, it was the opportunity to work in such a field. Spies! Hush hush conspiracies. The confidentiality waiver he had to sign was more than enough to get him excited about the job. He knew the organization was poaching the best college students for this, he didn’t care.

He cared even less after he met Melinda.

Her name is serious and solemn, like she is. She’s SHIELD’s prodigy, he hears afterwards. Deathly and highly feared by her peers. Andrew finds the idea funny; every time he talks to Melinda he can’t help but think about how soft and sweet and shy she seems, how lovely.

He spends weeks goofing around her, he’s so shameless. He would love to make her smile. He uses pitiful excuses about wanting to know how Phil is doing - and Melinda knows they are excuses - even though Andrew has moved on to working with other agents.

“Do you want to grab a coffee?” he finally asks one day. It’s just as small trip to SHIELD’s commissary but he has to start somewhere. _They_ have to start somewhere.

“I don’t like coffee,” she replies.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean -” maybe she is better at rules than he is.

“No,” she cuts him off. He thinks she looks a bit flushed. “I mean I don’t like coffee, itself. But please invite me to tea.”

She smiles at him shyly, _hopeful_.

Andrew knows he’s not supposed to fall in love but how could he not.

 

**two**

He’s retching, resting his chin on the rim of the toilet. What a charming first day in the new flat, spent on his knees in this tiny bathroom.

She tried to poison him, after all.

“Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you keep eating?”

She’s running her hand through his hair, brushing a cold towel across his mouth.

“Because you worked on the dinner so hard,” he tells her. “You wanted tonight to be special.”

She smiles.

It’s a beautiful smile of awe and fondness Andrew doesn’t understand.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

She doesn’t explain right away. Later she tells him. About always being good at things, about her hard work, about how no matter how well she did people around her would say “more”, they would say “work harder”. About how her mother would never pretend the food was delicious just to avoid hurting her feelings. And how Melinda loved her mother for it, but that it meant a lot that Andrew did such a thing.

“Don’t do that again,” she tells him now. “Tell me if my food makes you sick, okay?”

“I will,” Andrew says, nodding. “You’re an awful cook, Melinda. We’re ordering takeout every day for the rest of our lives.”

“I like that plan,” she says, wrapping one warm arm around his back and drawing him to her.

They kiss. He must taste horrible, he thinks, but she doesn’t care, they don’t care - they are young and drunk with the freedom of their first night living together and in love. they make out on the bathroom floor for what seems like hours.

 

**three**

He wakes up first, like he wanted, with the sun in his eyes and no longer wondering if he should have taken her to Vegas because this is _perfect_ and as a therapist he knows how dangerous that word is, he knows about impossible expectations but what does it matter right now.

Melinda wakes little by little - he thinks she hasn’t slept in this late since he’s known her, a lifetime of discipline Andrew sometimes resents because it makes her leave his side too early, every morning. He’s selfish. He’s so selfish when it comes to Melinda.

To his wife.

He still can’t believe it.

He knows Melinda thinks she’s the lucky one but she’s wrong.

His wife (tastes new, like they are new, different people) wakes up little bit little, stretching her arms, her hand falling on the pillow, right between them, so that sun bounces off her wedding ring like a blessing, filling the room with light.

The first thing she does this morning is the first thing she did after they got married.

She smiles.

 

**four**

Part of him never expected to see her again.

Even when Phil contacted him for help.

Part of him knew that when Melinda makes a decision it’s final. Maybe he didn’t want to hope. Because he knows himself - sentimental, tender-hearted and optimistic. And none of those things are a good way of dealing with painful realities. If he were to analyze himself he’d say it’s just an excuse not to move on. He would be wrong.

Having her here in his office in front of him doesn’t feel like a miracle after all. The shocking part is how natural it seems.

He’s hard with her and then he teases her and makes her smile and it’s so easy to slip back into it, so easy to find himself gloriously exhausted from love for this woman. Part of him believes he should probably tell her: that she always _deserves_ to know.

He never stopped loving her, not even for one day.

Not even when he found out she hadn’t made an attempt to contact him after SHIELD fell, and he was so angry he told himself it was time to give up. Seven years should be enough.

But it wasn’t.

 

**five**

The first day he meets her on her vacation she’s still stressed, looking over her shoulder, agent training kicking in even when she doesn’t want to.

Andrew doesn’t mind these things, as long as she doesn’t.

Over the next days they discover how much they have changed.

It’s a joy, finding out new things in her, how she got older and softer and braver and more wonderful while he wasn’t there. He feels having missed the change like a stab through the heart but he knows that the things she went through without him were exactly what made you into this new person. She’s someone new and it’s so much easier to fall in love with her than with her younger old self. Andrew hopes a fraction of that is true for her, that Melinda likes the person he has become without her, now that she’s getting to know him -and she is getting to know him little by little, through his bad jokes and teaching anecdotes, over cocktails before supper, through long walks along the beach where he talks too much, and the one night she tells him everything that has happened to her these past couple of years (things for which Andrew wishes he could punish the whole world), and waking up together but not like it used to be before.

They’re different.

He holds her hand on the third afternoon while they walk. The moment is beautiful, sun setting and the island almost humming with it.

Melinda smiles at him - the first real smile, he could always tell those apart, they are shy and small but only small like stars are small, their real light incalculable - and Andrew believes they could stay here like this forever.

 

 

**one**

She fell in love with Andrew when she was twenty-four. She was arrogant and cocky and knew nothing of the world. She never fell out of love.

Over twenty years later she’s sitting in a chair in a makeshift hospital tent.

A lot of people coming and going. The impending disaster that wasn’t such. The last minute rescue. She should probably be somewhere else, with the team. She doesn’t care. She stays here by his side. It takes days for him to wake up. May knows it’s going to be okay - she’s still too afraid to _believe_ the doctors when they tell her, though, and she prays for the first time in many years and remembers how much comfort praying always gave her. One of the things Bahrain had taken away from her.

The man asleep in front of her is another.

“Melinda?” he asks when he wakes up, foggy and weak, but God, she thought she would never hear her name said like that ever again.

“I’m here.”

“Me too, apparently,” he says and May wants to hit him in the head, him and his stupid sense of humor that apparently survived the whole ordeal. “Where I am?”

“A hospital,” she replies.

He winces. “How long was I out?”

“A couple of days.”

“A couple of days?!” he asks, high-pitched.

“You had malnutrition and a couple fo broken bones,” she tells him.

Still, he’s wonderfully and miraculously alive in front of her and so close she could touch him if she wanted - and she wants, but she is a coward when it comes to Andrew, she always was. Even their first date - it took weeks in which _she_ should have asked, not wait for him to do it, precious weeks they could have been together and loving each other and now it would be part of her memories. What a waste.

“What happened?” Andrew asks, in disbelief that he’s still alive and himself, and himself and no one and nothing else.

“You’ll have to ask Daisy about that, “ she replies. “She somehow managed to find a frequency for her vibrations that allowed her to -”

“Kill Lash while keeping me alive?”

She nods. 

They stay in silence for a moment, as if they were drawing a breath after almost being drowned. 

“How long are you going to stay with me?” Andrew asks after a while, sounding more scared and smaller than she’s ever heard.

May touches his hand.

“Forever,” she tells him.

He smiles.

Twenty years later she falls in love again.


End file.
